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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/24489442">Wade Saves The Kids</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/MagnusOpum/pseuds/MagnusOpum'>MagnusOpum</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Deadpool - All Media Types, Spider-Man - All Media Types, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Alternate Universe - High School, Asexuality, Depression, Domestic Violence, Eating Disorder Not Otherwise Specified, Eating Disorders, F/F, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, Mating Cycles/In Heat, Secrets, Self-Esteem Issues, Slow Burn, Suicidal Thoughts</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>In-Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-06-01</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-06-09</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-04 04:28:06</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Explicit</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Underage</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>3</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>6,601</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/24489442</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/MagnusOpum/pseuds/MagnusOpum</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>WADE Wilson is in love with getting into the habit of failing to break his habits - and by in love, he means tormented by, as love is often interchangeable with torment. Mum says "you will eat when you're hungry" - well, fuck that, Mum. Mum says "you will get into sex, eventually" - wrong again, bzzzt. Mum says "Dad was a bad man" - jury's out.</p><p>OR</p><p>Wade is twisted into so many knots that he's an honourary boy-scout. </p><p>(love and loss and listlessness ; it's a funky ride)</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Peter Parker/Gwen Stacy, Peter Parker/Wade Wilson, Steve Rogers/Tony Stark, Vanessa Carlysle/Wade Wilson</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>19</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. Prologue</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>a/n: attempting to update every Tuesday.</p><p>This used to say Monday, but I'm updating a different fic on a Monday, so. This will be updated every Tuesday (Sydney time).</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <em>
    <span>Prologue</span>
  </em>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>WADE imagines that three big hairy men in black ski masks had broken into their house, trashed the place and Mum’s not-so-fine china, and gifted him with these double-black eyes as if he’d pressed his entire face into a telescope. He buries himself in the small safe crevice under the stairs and holds his breath until he passes out - thinking that he’ll wake up in another dimension where people who live in your house who break into your house can get arrested for it.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>His dad’s not a big scary man from the street, and he doesn’t carry a gun with him, and he’s never stolen a purse from a lady with hair as white as those wigs judges wear. His dad likes to take him fishing, out on the peace and quiet and lazy Saturday-ness of the river, and gut and debone the fish with him on the stiff and bug-bitten and morning-after-camping-ness of the pebble shore, before they lay them all out, one by one, side by side, on the hot coal from last night’s warm and marshmallowy camp-fire. His dad always, without fail, loses his glasses every time he needs them, and he isn’t big and brutish, but reedy in the neck like a stem of grass and fat and bloated in the body like a tumbleweed. His dad balances his beers in and on and around his belly, like a snail shell living on his front instead of his back. His dad kisses Mum every time he sees her, as if he’s fallen in love all over again, and he only gets mad sometimes because he loves Wade, and he can’t find Wade under the stairs because Wade has stolen his glasses and thrown them in the big red bin that leaves every Sunday full and comes back empty every Monday morning like magic.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Wade imagines that he’d be much hungrier as a bin and sometimes, when no one is looking, he pulls the bins out from the rain and under the front-porch. The red bin is big and bulging and smelly and as far as Wade can tell is the only bin that gets fed.  The green bin had bitten him once, when he’d tried to sneak a hand in to investigate what was inside, but Wade doesn’t hold it against it; Wade bites people too, sometimes. The yellow bin is shy and clean and empty, and, don’t tell anyone this, but Wade thinks it’s the prettiest. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>He’d tried to throw away Dad’s beer - because maybe that-stuff-Dad-does was just what beer </span>
  <em>
    <span>does </span>
  </em>
  <span>to people, and his dad hadn’t worked that it out yet -  but Dad had just waddled down to the shop and come home with an even fresher set and an even meaner drier sadder wallet. So mean that nobody had been able to eat any dinner that night - which was the saddest thing of all, in Wade’s opinion, because they get pizza on Wednesdays.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>His mum’s not a battered woman - as Mrs. Martha had tried to finagle out of him, in a dusty quiet corner of the school, the last time he’d showed up with a tight itchy pink cast for his broken elbow that he’d told everyone he’d gotten from three big hairy men in black ski masks - and she’s never demurred and batted her eyelashes and cried Hollywood tears as the big brutish man in the house took her by the neck like a flimsy little doll. His mum starts fights - just like Wade, who can’t </span>
  <em>
    <span>help </span>
  </em>
  <span>but start fights, like it’s in his blood, like he’s a little firecracker that his dad will ruffle the head of - and she’ll yell, and throw pots and pans and the whole kitchen sink at his dad while he’s lying, passed out, unconscious and drooling and smelling wild and funky like stale sticky beer, on the pull-out guest mattress that hasn’t seen a guest in years but has seen his dad every night for the last three weeks. His mum never goes quiet, not even when they have fights, and Wade feels sick in his stomach, like when he eats too much or can’t stop crying and wants to just throw up his whole life, because he’s so sick of the constant noise, and yelling, and questions that everybody is asking him all the time. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Under the stairs’ air is thick and hot and it sticks funny at the back of Wade’s throat, but he shuts his eyes - because he’s a stubborn little beast - and he bears it. Because Wade is not a man in a black ski mask, but a big bad growling bear, and he bears everything because he is a bear. Bears can’t help but bear, just like boys can’t help but boy and mums can’t help but mum their little boys - unless it’s his mum, because she can help herself not to, sometimes. He can take cold nights, and chills, because he’s got a big bear coat, and he can take his bruises, because little boy bruises are barely anything to a bear, and he likes fishing, just like bears do, but he doesn’t like sushi, no matter how much Mum or bears like raw fish. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>His dad doesn’t like sushi either, and Wade reckons that’s about as smart a thought as his dad is ever going to have. But that’s okay, because Dad and Mum and their whole house is a bear, and bears aren’t very smart, really. Otherwise, why would they still walk around on four legs?</span>
</p><p> </p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Chapter One; Rid Of The Devil, Aren't I?</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Dad's gone and left me to deal with Mum, yet I still don't quite think he's a basturd. Give me a minute.</p>
          </blockquote><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>a/n: I really really want to write this book. G'damn.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <em>
    <span>Chapter One; rid of the devil, aren’t I?</span>
  </em>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>THE sky is snotty and drizzling with sad rain just like Mum’s splotchy fat face. She’s wearing black, which really isn’t her colour if you ask him, and he’s wearing a suit so tight that he feels kinship to those corset-women you hear about from history. He can’t button up the bottom three on his suit, and he shifts a little self-consciously, wishing they’d gone for open-casket so that there’d be a little more attention on the sunken corpse three feet from them. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>She’s been ugly-crying for the past hour or so, making hoarse garbled wailing sounds like a dying dog, and Wade thinks maybe it’s because no one except her - and Wade, though he didn’t want to come, he wanted to stay home and play Nintendo - even bothered to show up. Even the old man in a black dress with glasses squintier than Dad’s who they’d paid to come and ‘say a few words’ looks a little bored at the service. He didn’t even know Wade’s dad, yet perhaps he can sense his evilness emanating from the pit with his magic cross.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>When Mum had said they were going to ‘celebrate your father’s passing’ - though if this is a party, it’s an awfully depressing one - Wade hadn’t been told about the pit. It makes ghosts shiver up out of his throat and condense in white mist in the air in front of him. Down, in the bottom of the pit, is worms, he thinks, and boggy mud, and death. The pit is all that awaits him one day when the world tires of his whiney presence. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>They lower Dad’s dead sagging flesh-pile into the pit. Wade kicks a hole in the dirt, and Mum shushes him with a gentle hand on his shoulder as if he should respect the ground where dead people lurk, even though they’d paid someone to dig a hole quite a lot bigger just last night. He isn’t quite sure why he should listen to her - </span>
  <em>
    <span>she’s </span>
  </em>
  <span>the one who hit Dad over the back of the head with a rusty shovel - but he does, anyway - perhaps out a primitive drive to not get hit over the head with a rusty shovel. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“May he never be forgotten, and live on forever in your hearts. Amen,” the old man concludes the ceremony, with a sanguine wise-owl smile, like he’s gate-crashed enough funerals and met enough death to see it properly. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Mum mutters, “Amen,” and throws a wilted rose on top of the casket she’d polished with the left-overs from the last Aunt Obese-Cat-Lady’s death-party. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Wade says, “Amen,” as well, because he can’t wait to get home and Super Mario Bros up his life. It’s been awfully dreary and boring since Dad went and got himself killed, like an idiot, and he no longer has anyone who is willing to play Luigi. Wade has </span>
  <em>
    <span>some </span>
  </em>
  <span>standards- and his Uncle Steroids had once told him that to play Luigi was to admit that he’d always be 2nd Player.</span>
</p><p>
  
</p><p>
  <span>Mum shakes hands with the old dress man, and thanks him for the beautiful ceremony. Old man’s eyes are kind with condolences as he holds her hands with two of his own, and Mum’s eyes are kind with gratitude, as if to say, thanks for at least trying to make him sound like less of an asshole. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Wade wonders if she wakes up in the night because of that voice in the back of your head or if she doesn’t even have one. He wonders if, when she dreams of Dad, she has a ghost-image of him bleeding from the back of his skull, or if he’s bloodless and hairless and thoughtless and perfect, like a posthumous portrait painted by angels. He wonders if she’s convinced herself that Dad never loved her, or Wade, and that what he did to them wasn’t love, because Wade knows that’s only a lie the brain tells you to make you stop thinking of the black pit of death the lies in the funeral garden in the back of your every mind. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Or, maybe he’s going through an emo phase and has been ironically listening to too much My Chemical Romance.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Eventually, they reach the blue Chevy, and Wade buckles up in the front seat without asking if he can sit there. Another pro of a dead dad is it’s just the two of them, meaning Wade doesn’t get stranded with the back-seat all the time. It’s beach-sandy and filled with empty road-trip take-out cartons and Mum never bothers to clean the back because she never sits there. Dad, chivalrous and noble and kind, had always let her have shot-gun. Shot-gun is also the most dangerous seat a passenger can be in because instinctively the driver always protects himself, but also the coolest, because you get to pick the music and have the best view in a car crash.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“Wade,” Mum says, and her hands are stark white on the steering wheel, but she’s not driving. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>He thinks he can still feel that ghost in his throat, even as the car’s heater starts to warm him up, thawing him through to his soft middle bits, like the melted caramel inside Mars Bars. He rubs his naked hands together and wishes Mum would’ve let him wear those soft woolen gloves that he imagines he owns. She’d wanted to hold his hand, so he’d left his see-through mental gloves in the car and had let himself feel the bony suffocating grip of her fingers interlaced with his. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Wade likes to hold his own hand - that way he can decide on the pressure he likes, what he means by the gesture, and doesn’t have to rely on someone else for his own soothing. It feels unsustainable and dangerous to use others for their affection; like a tight-rope walk, how can he know if they’ll hold him or let him plummet to his death? Ever since he was a baby, using pretty much the only excuse in his life to cry out for assistance, bawling his eyes out to no avail, Wade had learnt to hold </span>
  <em>
    <span>himself</span>
  </em>
  <span>. Pacifiers envy him, hippy-dippy-love-gurus would give him sad-eyes, and cuddle-prostitutes are afraid he’ll put them out of business. Of course, he does this </span>
  <em>
    <span>only ever alone</span>
  </em>
  <span>, as instructed long ago; so long that he has lost the memory but kept the instinct. At three years old, Mum had caught him rocking to-and-fro soothing-slowly and had given him his second ever lecture on “public and private spaces” ; Dad had been in charge of the masturbation one yet for some reason Wade had never had that problem. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“Wade-” At least Dad had spent enough time around him to give him a nickname, as distasteful as it was. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“What?” He doesn’t turn to look at her. He grinds his teeth together even though he knows they’ll ache later. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Wade eyes her from his peripheral, but pretends he’s not. Every conversation between them is a labyrinth of secrets and subtexts, a maze of mirrors that he tries to navigate. Mum has her forehead pressed over her hands, and her shoulders are shaking, and the engine isn’t on, but he still feels like he should be saying, </span>
  <em>
    <span>look at the road</span>
  </em>
  <span>. She’s always driving without looking, as if she wants to crash, her thoughts always taking her elsewhere. It’s like she’s forgotten the purpose of driving - to take you places other than where you already are. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“Wade, look at me, please,” She’s blubbering again. Wade’s forehead creases in two, like a paper plane, and he feels hot in the face and wants to break something. There’s an untapped power inside him, a feeling of potential, like he could just up and explode. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>He turns his head, and stares at her, because he wants to go home and she’s not making it any easier. He misses when Dad just drove off, while everyone was still fighting, and threatened to drive them all off a cliff if everyone didn’t start singing along to the old slow-songs radio. Mum would change it to Pop Rock, and Dad would make that corny joke about pop rocks, and Wade would brood, and shade his grey face, and stare out the window with his stomach churning with tears. Eventually, the feeling would fade like a ripple of pain dimming and dimming until dusk and half-way home Wade would begin to sing along. He wishes they could still just ignore everything, and drive away. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Her smile trembles, and her lips quiver gently, like water rippling smoothly down the river, “Wade, I know things are confusing right now. I know you miss your dad, and I do too, but he wasn’t a good man, okay? I need you to stop looking at me like I’m the bad man, because I’m not the bad man, Wade. I know it’s hard to get that right now, but I need you to know that I’m your mother, and I’m all you’ve got.”</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Wade spits into the cup holder between them, because he </span>
  <em>
    <span>knows </span>
  </em>
  <span>all that, so she should stop </span>
  <em>
    <span>saying it </span>
  </em>
  <span>every fucking second of the day. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>He imagines a conversation in his head. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>He says ‘You killed him with a shovel. You told the police he threatened to kill you. You made me keep it a secret.’</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>She would say ‘But he’d pushed you down the stairs, and he was getting drunker and drunker and drunker and he’d do it again, Wade.’ </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>‘And you’ve pushed me out the window.’ </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>‘It’s not the same thing, Wade,’ and she would make a thousand promises and a thousand excuses and she’d hold his hand because she only ever touches him when she’s apologising. He would believe her because he didn’t want a mum like her but she was all he had left, so he had to pretend she was better than she was. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Wade always tells himself that this day is the day he never speaks to her again, and he will </span>
  <em>
    <span>really </span>
  </em>
  <span>make her scrunch up her face and </span>
  <em>
    <span>think </span>
  </em>
  <span>about how she’s tearing him apart; but really, he’s never going to do that. He’s always going to mumble good morning over eggs - because not everyone’s mother makes their breakfast, let alone </span>
  <em>
    <span>eggs</span>
  </em>
  <span>, some people can’t afford eggs, and Wade </span>
  <em>
    <span>really </span>
  </em>
  <span>ought to be more grateful - and they’ll put all the yesterdays behind them, and Wade will pretend that she’s not going to do him dirty again and Mum will not pretend anything at all, because she doesn’t think anything is wrong in the first place. </span>
  <em>
    <span>Families fight </span>
  </em>
  <span>Dad always used to say, and Mum would give Wade that </span>
  <em>
    <span>look </span>
  </em>
  <span>that only women in the Wilson family can pull off, that’s 30% incredulity and 70% I-know-better-Wade, and she’d say, </span>
  <em>
    <span>You make us seem like monsters, Wade, but you turned out okay.</span>
  </em>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>He imagines a second conversation, and in this one, it’s yesterday, and the words that they’ve both been regretting have sucked themselves back inside their mouths. He is eating these hot tasteless eggs that Mum always forgets to season, and the floral plastic tablecloth is bunched up in his hands. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>He would’ve said, ‘I love you, Mum, but you scare me. I want you to change. I want you to turn yourself in to the police, so I don’t have to think about all this hard stuff anymore.’ Wade always likes to pretend he’s in a movie, because this is what it’d be like in a movie; he’d be straight-forward, and stern, and he’d stand up for himself. This would be the moment that he ‘realises’ that how she treats him is ‘wrong’ and that they need to fix themselves. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>She wouldn’t have said this, but he so wanted her to be able to, ‘Yes, Wade, I love you too, enough to turn myself in.’ </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>But, they’re not wired like that, and if Wade had said that, Mum would’ve thrown him out of another window, no doubt. It’s always fun going down, but eventually you hit the compacted soil, and Mum’s just as bad a gardener as she is a cook. Dad had used to say she was a part of a militant faction of fem-warriors out to prove that women shouldn’t do all the cooking and cleaning because they’re just not capable. Mum would crinkle her eyes and laugh at him like he’s not being serious, doing a full-on drunken snort that means she’s actually smiling rather than the pleasant tinkling chitter she puts on for dinner parties. Wade would sleuth off into the shadows because it hurts more when they’re getting on than when they’re not. It’s like sleeping; the clinomaniac in him wishes he could sleep forever but there is always school in the morning. The hammer and anvil in his alarm clock are just waiting to clang and Wade’s ears can’t quite take the heat.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>So, he says nothing. The conversation chokes and sputters and coughs out one last goodbye, and Mum starts the car, that grumbles because it’s cold and wet and didn’t want to visit dead people today either, and they drive back to their big empty bear house in silence.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>/</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>It is three days after the funeral and Wade has made a vow to himself that he will never cry again. He trumpets it up to himself like he wasn’t kicked out of the school band for being too lewd with his instrument (but really, give him a long phallic “instrument” and what can you expect a 14 year old to do?). Monks go years without speaking, and they’re fine; they’re enlightened, even. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Think of this as a testament to his self-control, he tells himself. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Today, Mum is trying to steam-clean Dad out of the carpet. Their vacuum cleaner had been on its last legs, and had sucked and wheezed like an old wrinkled prune on a ventilator, so she had to find a replacement on short notice. She’s rented out the whole home-loan-appliance store, and has moved on from the bright prideful feather-duster (who’d grown less and less rainbow-prideful as they’d slowly been eaten by ten years worth of dust) to the glass squeegee to the now complex marvel of the carpet cleaner. You need three years of university training before you’re qualified to use it, but Mum had taken the compressed course and worked out all the many dials and controls in only four hours. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Mum is not a good cleaner; she seems to be of the opinion that you do it once, and it’s done. Every few months, she’ll strip the place to its barest most naked parts and then wake up the next day and assume that it’ll never get dirty again; the last three days have been one of those times and Wade misses the old jungle-house he’d lived in last week. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>She’s moving on with her life, and ridding herself of all of the things that remind her of him. All the jewelry he bought her, she’s donated. All the rules he set, she breaks. She snips him out of every photo with her sewing scissors. She throws his old cross-word strips that she keeps on finding under the couch into a trash bag and spits dirty hateful words in with it. She’s removed herself from their marital bed and will sleep on the couch until they get a new mattress and repaint the frame a colour he’d have hated. She’s sanding out every inch of him and giving a great bit fuck you to heaven - </span>
  <em>
    <span>hell</span>
  </em>
  <span>, Wade thinks he’s meant to think, but he’s never really hated his Dad.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>He is a banned topic of conversation, now, which is hard when it’s all Wade can seem to think about. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>She hadn’t even waited until his body was cold to sell his prized leather-bound encyclopedia collection; Wade had never managed to get to the letter G, so that’s over half the alphabet he’ll be ill-informed of. A dull spike of resentment broils in him at the thought of never learning about Hippopotamuses. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Unlike Mum, Wade is trying to absorb Dad’s dwindling presence into his pores. He holds his breath in Dad’s study, as if his old dusty skin cells from last week can osmosis themselves into him, squirrel away into his organs through his lungs and lay little tiny eggs in the folds between his veins. Dad tastes like bitterness, and fermentation, and chugged beer - all homey smells that Wade already misses. The smells are layered somehow, and reflect different eras of Dad’s life - which is less Dad’s life and more </span>
  <em>
    <span>their </span>
  </em>
  <span>life, because Dad existed only so much as they did - and every grunge-wall that Mum removes simply reveals another wall; such as the tobacco Era, the cloying apple cider ice-age, the first two years of Wade’s life when they’d both failed to quit smoking, the KFC age with chicken as the primary source of vegetables in the house. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Wade had raided his alcohol cabinet; but Mum had already bleached that half of the house, and Wade wasn’t quite desperate enough to lick dried bleach from the shelving. Wade is sleeping in the grooves Dad’s body had left behind in the double bed, slowly fading into a cast of his own body. He wears Dad’s clothes, his woolen thick old-man-sweater, the 20 year old nostalgic musty leathers he found at the back of the closet, his spare-pair of glasses. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>His dad was just a sweet old bespeckled man, when you think about it. He was the type to let the fishes go half the time after catching them, to dance with Mum until she started smiling with eye-crinkles and forgiving him with splotchy red-lipped kisses. He was not a lights-off kind of man - would never be seen </span>
  <em>
    <span>not </span>
  </em>
  <span>being seen with Mum - and he was incapable of not loving people.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>After every fight, no matter what, no matter how heated, come fire or snow, he would knock on Wade’s door and apologise, would convince himself that he’d never hit Wade again, sometimes even convince Wade too. He wouldn’t leave until Wade could sleep easy, knowing that there would be no more fighting that night, that the storm had passed, that Winter only comes once a year. </span>
  <em>
    <span>That </span>
  </em>
  <span>is a warm-hearted man, not a cold-blooded reptile.  </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>By day, Mum cleans, and by night, she cries and hugs herself - or that is what Wade likes to imagine. He pictures her as a grieving widow, a black-veiled wedding-rememberer, a movie woman. He doesn’t want to hear her celebrating the death of the king.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>By day, Wade lets kid’s TV shows trickle over his brain, softening and shrinking it. He can feel how small his thoughts are now. They barely leave the confines of his bedroom, and their legs are short and stunted. He can watch himself thinking in circles, somedays, like a whirlpool going around and around until eventually he’s sucked down below. By night, he slips into sleep and wakes up to find he is still dreaming. He’s still waiting for the punchline, somehow. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Wade is so scared of forgetting his face that he carries around a photo of Dad in his back pocket, and sometimes laughs when he sits down because he is quite literally sitting on his Dad’s face. He’d probably kick the shit of him if he did that in the real world, and Wade thinks back almost fondly on it; as if he’s sewn together with his dad in an unbreakable bond of pain and difficulty and fixing things before you unravel them again, a continuous cycle of together and apart. He wonders if his body will start to replicate the smell of him after a while, from inhaling so much of him, hopes their DNA is similar enough that Wade’s nucleuses will get confused and bump into each other like friends you had forgotten at a party and begin to spit out cells upon cells identical to his father’s. Yesterday, he hadn’t moved for three hours because he’d been irrationally afraid of sweating out his Dad’s presence, and today he’s been pacing up and down the hallway in his dad’s church shoes, trying to reshape his feet. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Wade can’t fill his dad’s shoes, but he wonders if he’ll grow into them. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Mum pointedly says nothing about the wrinkled sheets that night as she sets the haggard grumpy mattress on fire out the front. She warms her hands over it as Wade peers out through the frosted front windows. He heaves himself against the pane, feeling hot and feverish and hungry, and he wonders if he’ll feel like this forever. His eyes water but he pinches himself, hard, and the tears seem to retract back into him, like a turtle dipping back into its shell. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Mum has given up cooking, and snides that if Wade is hungry then </span>
  <em>
    <span>You could always make something for yourself</span>
  </em>
  <span>. Wade feels like he’s reached the bottomest part of hunger, the widest part of the pit, where your body begins to eat itself, really dig into that five course meal, and that somehow through a strange magic he’s full when he’s empty. There’s being tired, then over-tired, then completely over the fence where you feel like you could run and run forever. Now, he is bottomless, someone has unbuckled his suitcase-stomach upside down and all the contents have flopped out, but he is used to this raw open feeling. He was peckish, then hungry, then starving, and now he is a word that does not exist in the human language; that is no longer hunger.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>He wonders how long people can survive without food, and finds it worrying that he’s missing the part of him that worries about that. He’s playing himself without the strings attached and all the guitar-wood does is whistle. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>If Mum starts to sing camp-fire songs, Wade might just put a stop to this, but for now, he doesn’t. He slips away from the window and into his bed. It’s cold and unslept in; feels new in its unfamiliarity. He doesn’t fall into sleep, but rather trips into thoughts that then shift into strangely vivid stories. Slowly, the sensation of his skin dripping into the covers fades to a warm cocoon and the colour of black beneath his eyelids sparks into a backdrop for the shadow puppets of dreams. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>The house is quiet, and still, and Wade misses the fear that came with that big old bear that had been living with them. That fear had kept him alive through the night, and now he worries that he’s forgotten how to breathe, that his heart only has two settings </span>
  <em>
    <span>start </span>
  </em>
  <span>and </span>
  <em>
    <span>stop</span>
  </em>
  <span> and it has no reason to </span>
  <em>
    <span>start </span>
  </em>
  <span>if there is no chase. </span>
</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. Chapter Two; Are my secrets your business? Why, yes, they are.</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>a/n: I know this chapter isn't much, but I promised myself I'd put at least something out every Tuesday. I'll probably just add more to this chapter next Tuesday so it's a complete chapter...</p><p>update: lol, finally finished the chapter. This is the fic I'm going to try and work on everyday. I'd like to write a chapter a day, and finish it before the end of 2020 if I can...</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <em> Chapter Two; Are my secrets your business? Why, yes, they are. </em>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>He is back to school on the Monday; four days after Dad has well and truly kicked that bucket. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>He wonders when he will stop expecting Dad to be in the kitchen, with the newspaper and coffee, scritching and scratching with that pensive look on his face; as if the random scatterings of letters in their crossword boxes held some uninhibited meaning that he could slurp up. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Mum has now begun washing the walls with acutely scented soapy water, and playing old 80s pop hits on their highest volume as she clean-dances. She’s regaining her hips with every swagger-filled tune and Wade thinks maybe he needs to lock the front door so as to not expose the world to his mother’s nightmare-inducing hip-thrusts. Let us pray for the sanctity of the Girl Scouts. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>She’d drummed out breakfast that morning; a bowl of weet-bix with a chopped up banana. By the time it had reached Wade - she’d made it secretly, as if attempting to fulfill her role of a mother by technicality alone - it could hardly be called edible, and one could not distinguish between either layer. Unnamed mush, he diagnosed it as and, even after everything, Wade felt he deserved better. The bin wasn’t as prima-donna, though, and happily scoffed the bowl whole like a snake unhinging its jaw to consume its prey in one swallow.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Mum didn’t blink, and simply shrugged, as if to say, </span>
  <em>
    <span>you’ll eat when you’re hungry.</span>
  </em>
  <span> That fire-cracker in Wade’s heart itches to prove her wrong. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <em>
    <span>Total Eclipse Of The Heart </span>
  </em>
  <span>worms its way into Wade’s ears and followed him all the way to the bus-stop. Wade is made of silicon and robot-parts on the bus, because even though his dad has just died, no one notices. He realises there isn’t a death-smell, and that to everyone else on the bus, no one is dead and they all live forever. After all, you live forever until you don’t anymore. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Wade, surrounded by the teeming insective masses, the automatic brains that switched </span>
  <em>
    <span>on </span>
  </em>
  <span>and </span>
  <em>
    <span>off </span>
  </em>
  <span>between worlds each second, sighs back into his skin. He’s always felt most at ease in the secrecy of crowds. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>He hopes he could make himself so busy that he forgot why he wanted to. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>/</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“Quite the shiner, Wadey boy,” Weasel muses, wonderingly, as they settle in from class. Wade has settled back into his skin, and his skin aches only as badly as he can handle. Right on the edge of destruction, at that point smack-bang between discomfort and pain and too-much.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“Are my secrets your business, Jack-ass?” Although Wade calls him only derivations of Jack (the highlights being Jack-ass, Jerk-off, Jack-me), they both know he thinks of him as Weasel. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Weasel puffs out his chest, “Why, yes, they are exactly my business; my profits entirely rely on what the latest gossip thinks of everyone, including you. So, that bruise, Mum, Dad, or Ajax?”</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Wade meets his eyes, and attempts to ‘sear’ into them like he’d once read on a movie poster, </span>
  <em>
    <span>searing-eyes</span>
  </em>
  <span>, “Mum.”</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Weasel whistles and leans back, severely impressed, as if he hadn’t thought Wade’s Mum had it in her - Wade hadn’t either; which is the funny thing, especially since she’s done it before. Wease’s hand itches in his lap, as if he wishes to reach out and </span>
  <em>
    <span>touch</span>
  </em>
  <span> and poke and prod, but as much as he pretends to disrespect Wade and use him solely for profit, Weasel has a </span>
  <em>
    <span>line</span>
  </em>
  <span> and that line is personal boundaries. He knows how Wade feels about touch and since he can’t un-know that, he has no excuse not to keep his distance. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“Mum, this time, eh? That sure is a shiner. Fist or object?” Weasel’s brain is taking mental notes but Wade doesn’t expect the actual story of what he said to be what the grape vine clings to; although Weasel is the school’s most reputable news source, not everyone goes looking for the truth. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Wade gives up on searing, since his eyes are starting to ache, and stares off into the distance, </span>
  <em>
    <span>broodingly</span>
  </em>
  <span>, like another movie poster man he’s met but can’t quite recall, “Fist.”</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“What’d you do to provoke her?” Weasel begins to dig his school books out of his bag - he likes to begin studying at lunch, five minutes before the bell goes, so that he can both have his free lunch time and also pretend he is a conscientious student. He’s used to the running sit-com of Wade’s life; which has begun to sink more into dramedy territory as Wade enters his emo phase. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Wade likes how Weasel knows he’s provoked her; that he knows him well enough to know he </span>
  <em>
    <span>starts</span>
  </em>
  <span> fights. He isn’t some </span>
  <em>
    <span>passive victim</span>
  </em>
  <span>; he’s an equal-offender, he’s a fire-cracker, he’s a </span>
  <em>
    <span>man</span>
  </em>
  <span>.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Wade smiles, and grits his teeth, primping to show off to a mate who has never been impressed by his tales, “Well, you know what she’s like, anything will set her off. But, and maybe I forgot to tell you this-” Weasel’s entire body jerks at the horrific thought of missing information. “-but my Dad died on Friday. He started a fight with the wrong person; anyway, Mum’s been demonising him from beyond the grave and is terrified to think Dad was not as bad as she thinks he was. I just said how </span>
  <em>
    <span>alike </span>
  </em>
  <span>she is to him, and like magic, she bopped me, right across the nose. I could see it coming, the swing of her arm, all revved up like a pitcher. This morning, to make up for it, she made me breakfast, not that she cared that whether I ate it or not, but </span>
  <em>
    <span>still</span>
  </em>
  <span>, anger issues, much, right?”</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Weasel’s brain takes a few moments to catch up; decoding Wade-speak to a sellable piece of goss. Wade leans back and prepares himself to grin in triumph, when Weasel remarks in that annoyingly-perceptive way of his, “Your dad </span>
  <em>
    <span>was </span>
  </em>
  <span>a freaking maniac, though. You know that, right?” He says nothing about his death but somehow says </span>
  <em>
    <span>everything </span>
  </em>
  <span>about his death. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <em>
    <span>Jack-ass.</span>
  </em>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Weasel is Wade’s personal emotional bartender - even though neither of them drink except in Church - but even this is slightly </span>
  <em>
    <span>too far</span>
  </em>
  <span> for his standards</span>
  <em>
    <span>, </span>
  </em>
  <span>“Ease off, okay.”</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Weasel begins to scribble in his maths margin, something about </span>
  <em>
    <span>a </span>
  </em>
  <span>and </span>
  <em>
    <span>b </span>
  </em>
  <span>and as far as Wade was concerned, </span>
  <em>
    <span>letters </span>
  </em>
  <span>have </span>
  <em>
    <span>no place </span>
  </em>
  <span>in maths. “He kicked you down the stairs a month ago. The month before that, he tried to drown you at Fairsley Rive-”</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Wade interrupts, suddenly too hot for his shirt but in the uncomfortable situation of not being able to take off his shirt, “He did not </span>
  <em>
    <span>try to drown me</span>
  </em>
  <span>. We were </span>
  <em>
    <span>father-son bonding</span>
  </em>
  <span> - things get… rough in the woods. He just, it was just a game between </span>
  <em>
    <span>men</span>
  </em>
  <span>, not that you’d get that, seeing as you’re all rodent.”</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>The insult soars right over Weasel’s head and Wade is all-of-a-sudden resentful at the fact that Weasel is skinny enough to have </span>
  <em>
    <span>no problem whatsoever </span>
  </em>
  <span>with removing his shirt in public spaces; even though, Weasel too, cannot strip at school.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <em>
    <span>Thanks for the logic, Brain.</span>
  </em>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Brain sneers back</span>
  <em>
    <span>, you’re welcome, fatso</span>
  </em>
  <span>.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span> “He threw a wine bottle at your head-”</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“</span>
  <em>
    <span>No, </span>
  </em>
  <span>that was Mum,” Wade reminds, triumphantly, ready to fist-pump.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“Sorry, </span>
  <em>
    <span>beer </span>
  </em>
  <span>bottle, at your head. He left you in the city for a </span>
  <em>
    <span>whole day</span>
  </em>
  <span> on your own and-”</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“Ever heard of a little something called </span>
  <em>
    <span>adventure </span>
  </em>
  <span>or are you too busy tracking other people’s personal lives?” Wade huffs out an annoyed breath that pushes his hair all the way off his face for a second. He usually keeps his features covered to hide bruising on days like this. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>His hair helpfully just happens to play into his emo fantasies. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>He’s referring to Weasel’s business of the Dead Pool (a side hustle from his School Gossip Column); a list of names of who was most likely to get ‘killed’ by Ajax - the resident self-important psycho - in the next week. Wade’s name is always at the top of the list, and some of the kids mockingly call out </span>
  <em>
    <span>DP </span>
  </em>
  <span>whenever Ajax is storming towards him. The funny thing is that DP also stands for ‘double penetration’ and once Ajax heard that was his ‘calling card’, he beat the whole lot into the ground.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <em>
    <span>One day</span>
  </em>
  <span>, Wade swore to himself, </span>
  <em>
    <span>I will finally get a growth spurt and I will pummel Ajax so hard that his beautiful face decides to take a vacation. </span>
  </em>
  <span>Ajax is so hot it hurts and Wade desperately wants to bite his face off - but not in </span>
  <em>
    <span>that </span>
  </em>
  <span>way, Mum, in the somehow-less-concerning Hannibal Lecter way. Wade </span>
  <em>
    <span>wishes </span>
  </em>
  <span>he had a pain-kink just to disgust that motherfucker - but for some bizarre reason he’s broken in that way.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>You see, Wade never gets off. To anything, anyone, not even to the smirks-a-lot psychotic-bully-character.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>This is the </span>
  <em>
    <span>one thing </span>
  </em>
  <span>that Weasel doesn’t know. That no one does.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“Whatever,” Weasel mumbles as the bell goes, probably still pissed that he has to hang with Wade - the only person in school who doesn’t get all offended and uppity at Weasel’s constant exploitation of their secrets,  “Just glad your old man is finally dead. Fingers crossed the old hag follows.”</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Wade meets his eyes again, second time's the charm, something like that, “Want to play Nintendo at my house after school?”</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Weasel rolls his eyes, “Never. Stop asking.”</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>-)</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Ajax is sitting in Wade’s seat, preeningly blowing on his nails as the blood of his enemies dries into a thin film of nail polish. Must’ve killed a preteen or something this morning since he’s good-naturedly whistling his favourite song, </span>
  <em>
    <span>The Devil Is Fine</span>
  </em>
  <span>. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“Dipshit,” Wade calls out to him, and Ajax seems not to hear him. Maybe he doesn’t respond to </span>
  <em>
    <span>dipshit</span>
  </em>
  <span>, huh. “Francis! Dipshit!”</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Ajax’s head turns a full 180 degrees, like an owl or a doll’s head in a horror flick. Sweetly, Ajax demures, “Deadmeat, is that you? I could’ve sworn you were just pulp under my shoe the last time we spoke.”</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Wade hovers over Ajax’s shoulder, “You’re in my seat, Frankie-cucky-baby-cunty-dear.”</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Ajax’s sharp-as-knife cheekbones catch the sun as he grins wolfishly, and Wade wants to be him so bad in that moment, “Could have sworn I own this school, including you. Don’t ya know whose Mummy posts the teacher’s cheques?.” </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Grinning, Wade pushes Ajax out of his seat, and if the world was just the other boy would spill on the ground like a broken bag of potatoes. Somehow by a dark magic, Wade is the one who falls, and Ajax stands treeishly lordful above him. He holds down a hand to help Wade up, but Wade would rather grow mould cultures on his school shirt than accept “a favour” from the bloodiest freak at school. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Ajax pauses for a moment as he notices the bruising under Wade’s thick hair, “Oh? What’s this?”</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Wade flattens his hair down, mulishly, “I’m cosplaying as you from when I meatgrind you.”</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Patting Wade’s cheek - which </span>
  <em>
    <span>ripples </span>
  </em>
  <span>to his horror - Ajax coos, “Whoever gave you that darling colouring, give them my thanks, fatso.” Then, elegantly, posh, like stainless ceramic, Ajax takes his seat in Wade’s spot, and faces the board.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <em>
    <span>Dear God, please kill Ajax right now</span>
  </em>
  <span>. </span>
  <em>
    <span>From, Wade.</span>
  </em>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <em>
    <span>(P.S. or at least kill me)</span>
  </em>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>-) </span>
</p><p> </p>
  </div></div>
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